NEWS RELEASE, 11/18/98

New housing recovery policies needed after major
urban disasters, says UC Berkeley professor in new book

By Cathy Cockrell, Public Affairs

BERKELEY -- Unless new policies are adopted, natural disasters such as
earthquakes and hurricanes will continue to leave economic and housing recovery
disasters in their wake, according to a new book by Mary Comerio, a University
of California, Berkeley, architecture professor.

In "Disaster Hits Home: New Policy for Urban Housing Recovery "
(University of California Press, 1998), Comerio writes that neither society
nor individual homeowners are prepared to recover the costs of natural disasters
likely to strike disaster-prone and densely populated areas of the United
States.

An internationally recognized authority on post-disaster reconstruction
issues, Comerio has spent much of the last 20 years on reconnaissance missions
to the scenes of such tragedies. For "Disaster Hits Home," she
tracked down elusive data on losses and recovery at six recent urban disasters
- Hurricane Hugo, Hurricane Andrew, and the Loma Prieta, Northridge, Kobe
and Mexico City earthquakes.

Comerio suggests policy initiatives to better equip urban areas for housing
recovery. Her recommendations include tax credits for mitigation - the modifying
of buildings and infrastructure to improve resistance to hazards; a reconception
of the government's role in disaster recovery; and government intervention
to reenergize the private disaster insurance market.

At present, she said, "you can't get disaster insurance except in
places where disasters don't happen. Yet there is nothing that will raise
capital for repairs as quickly and efficiently as insurance."

Though the losses she documents in this book are, in many cases, astronomical,
Comerio said much of the damage incurred was preventable.

"Every technical report on damage to housing in earthquakes and
hurricanes makes it clear that much of the damage could have been avoided
through mitigation and preparation," she writes in her book.

"A good disaster recovery program," she continues, "starts
with a serious commitment to reducing future damage.... Lowering the cost
of recovery by lessening the potential for damage is the single most effective
disaster recovery policy."

Comerio said mitigation "has been given lip service as the national
strategy for reduction of disaster losses. But no substantial policies have
yet been put forward to tie mitigation to the cost and availability of insurance
or the availability of public assistance for disaster recovery."

Mitigation measures such as bolting a house to its foundation or adding
hurricane clips to a roof may seem like a "no-brainer," she said.
"Yet despite efforts at public education, people are not voluntarily
improving their homes and commercial buildings."

The disincentive for mitigation, she said, "is that people believe
FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) will take care of them."

Changing that perception "will probably take a major disaster in
which people can't get the assistance they expect," Comerio said.

The biggest lesson she gleaned from her research was that, in an urban
setting, disaster recovery issues become economic, as well as life safety,
crises.

"In Kobe, the estimated losses were $90 billion," she said,
"and the real losses were closer to $150 billion. That is similar in
scale to the savings and loan crash."

Sophisticated advances in surveying technology and geographic information
science made Northridge the first earthquake in which minor damages were
systematically tracked, Comerio said.

What the data revealed was that "minor" damages in a structural
sense - to chimneys, porches, carports, plaster and the like - can add up
to major economic losses for individuals and a region. Comerio found that
the average insurance claim per household in the Northridge earthquake was
$40,000 - and some 200,000 home owners made claims.

She discovered that, after Northridge, home owners and local governments
received $20 billion to $30 billion from the federal government and insurance
companies. Payments for Hurricane Andrew were comparable.

But the present system of disaster recovery never was designed for major
urban disasters involving insurance payments and/or government loans on
such a scale, Comerio said.

In future urban disasters, made likely by dense populations in disaster-prone
Florida, the Eastern seaboard, and California, "the chance is virtually
nil that such large payments will ever again be made to a single metropolitan
area to finance disaster repairs," she said.

To support her case, "Disaster Hits Home" includes a rare assemblage
of rigorously checked data on damages and reconstruction efforts for each
of the six disasters studied.

Available disaster data have typically been highly suspect, Comerio said.
In a disaster emergency, "people use numbers to make a point,"
she said. "If a local government wants to assuage fears, it divides
the real loss numbers by two. If the state wants money from the feds, it
multiplies the losses by two. To decipher reality from the unchecked statistics
in newspapers and government reports is a Herculean effort."

Problems caused recently in Central America by Hurricane Mitch "are
not different than the patterns I have described in this book," said
Comerio.

She called the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch "a mirror for what could
happen here in the U.S. in future disasters. Everywhere in the world, recovery
requires capital and the willingness to reinvest."